Feeling down about Buffalo? Worrying about our unemployment, our struggling schools, our rain? Here's something to think about to make ourselves feel better:

Rochester.

Sure, even if the drive there down the Thruway is drab and dangerous, we've always been fond of our neighbor to the east. We've enjoyed rivalries, but they've been mostly friendly, and Buffalo has borrowed Rochester's snowplows and blues musicians. Spot Coffee spilled over into Rochester. So, for a while, did Artvoice.

But now, let's be honest, Buffalo needs a whipping boy, someone to make us feel that we're not the most pitiful kid on the playground.

And Rochester fits that role perfectly.

Why? Because at the moment, they're worse off than we are. Their economy held up longer than ours, thanks to Kodak and Xerox. But now it's dying an uglier death than ours. And we're ahead of them, because we hit bottom some time ago, and now we're pushing off.

Cheering up already, aren't you?

Grit your teeth sometime soon, and take that boring drive to Rochester. Check it out. A friend and I have been going there every few months for five years, and we're stunned at what we see. Rochester is fading like an old Kodacolor photograph. The city's blue downtown Thruway signs have bleached to a kind of gray. Some are falling off their signposts.

They have beggars on the streets in Rochester. One guy has stood for five years on a highway ramp holding a sign reading: "Will Work For Food." On a recent Friday, he was joined at another intersection by a slender, denim-clad blond. Her sign read: "Help My Family."

If Buffalo parties like it's 1999, Rochester parties like it's 1929.

Buffalo thinks our construction projects take forever. One long road in Rochester, an artery that runs past the Kodak plant, has been choked up with cones for five years. Perhaps because of stresses like these, Rochesterians are in a perpetual state of road rage. Even pedestrians! One guy was walking in the street. We tried to give him room, and he yelled: "Pick a lane, @#*(&!"

And this was on a Friday. During happy hour. What are they like the rest of the week?

We found that Edward's, the upscale restaurant we'd hoped to visit, had closed, its owner blaming Rochester's economy. So we went to a Japanese restaurant. There was no sushi.

"The sushi bar is being remodeled," the waiter said.

Formica was coming off the table. A screen flashed blurred photos of patrons grinning and brandishing chopsticks. Blurred photos. In Rochester. Then the cook set a pile of onions on fire in the middle of the hibachi grill and said: "Mount Fuji!"

For shame. Fuji should be a dirty word in this town.

Now for the sweetest part: Rochester gets more rain than we do. Everyone there is even pastier than we are.

They dress even worse than we do, too, maybe because they're so down in the dumps. At the Japanese joint, we saw backward baseball caps, shapeless gray T-shirts and baggy prison yard jeans. Not only that, but we saw Adam Sandler and Michael Moore clones out together. They went Dutch.

And gas was $2.30 a gallon.

See? Next to Rochester, we're not only west - we're West Coast. Driving back through that Williamsville toll barrier, you'll feel like you're coming home to San Diego. Compared with Rochester's problems, Buffalo's don't seem so bad. As the saying goes: "I once complained that I had no shoes, until I saw a man with no feet."